The San Jose Spiders, a professional Ultimate Frisbee team competing in the American Ultimate Disc League (AUDL), is proud to announce that Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of Silicon Valley's leading venture capital firms, has signed an agreement to be the team's title sponsor for the 2014 AUDL season.

Los Gatos, Calif. – Feb. 13, 2014 – Pertino, a company reinventing networking for the cloud era, today announced the appointment of the heads of inside sales and product as its cloud networking service enters general availability worldwide. Pertino’s Cloud Network Engine helps SMBs “unbox” their networks by replacing traditional VPN and network appliances with cloud-based services that can be deployed in a few clicks. Since launching public beta early last year, more than 5,000 customers have created free or paid Pertino cloud networks. To build on this momentum and early market leadership, Pertino hired two proven executives — Bharath Rangarajan as vice president of product and Ritch Haselden as vice president of inside sales.

Newly-launched startup Elementum has declared itself today with a pretty big haul of its own: $60 million in funding before leaving stealth mode, the latest $44 million in Series B funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Flextronics, a public supply chain company for tech hardware that incubated the new company.

Justin Caldbeck: I can’t think of a buzzier phrase in the tech industry these days than “growth hacking,” and in some ways I also can’t think of a more dangerous trend to glom onto. Sure, growth is good. But only if it’s real growth.

Nutanix today announced that it has closed its $101 million Series D financing co-led by Riverwood Capital and SAP Ventures. Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Greenspring Associates also participated in the round as new investors, joining existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Battery Ventures in the largest single financing round in the history of the converged infrastructure market.

Congratulations to Tony Fadell, Matt Rogers and the world class team at Nest! Today Nest announced that it has agreed to be acquired by Google. As investors in the company since the early days, we here at Lightspeed have been honored to be a partner of Nest. Nest is a very special company with a truly exceptional team… a VC’s dream. We are thrilled to see Nest have an opportunity to further accelerate its business as part of Google.